Project Details
"Mundane Monsters" brought together three speculative and humorous everyday monsters in an installation at the artist-run exhibition space Bonamatic in Copenhagen. The exhibition posed a paradox about how we can become accustomed to living in a constantly changing world with technological trends that supplement, expand and reinforce reality with extra layers of information.
Using a combination of augmented reality, 3D-printed sculptures, video and wireless transmissions, the exhibition summoned three everyday monsters from the cracks between the real and imaginary: invasive signal crayfish that hack WiFi signals, habitable purple oysters from a distant future, and a mysterious animal that haunts Danish market towns at night.
The exhibition was the result of several years' work with the three monsters, bringing together elements from numerous performances, exhibitions and interventions both domestically and abroad. Through these monstrous and bizarre creatures, the work addressed our relationship to more familiar creatures and digital systems that we share the modern technological world with. Across media, the fictional creatures were presented with a mixture of pop cultural humour and the kind of scientific authority familiar from public information campaigns.
The exhibition was accompanied by the website Mundanemonsters.oerum.org and a series of interventions in the local urban space. Rather than presenting concrete solutions or facts, the work suggested new ways to consider familiar problems and asked how we might learn to live in a world where what we have been accustomed to regarding as strange and disturbing increasingly becomes part of our everyday lives.
